5 things to watch this weekend – 31 January to 2 February

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank

Mike Leigh’s first modern-day drama since Another Year (2010), Hard Truths was rejected by Cannes, Venice and Telluride film festivals before eventually premiering at Toronto – and the injustices continue with Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s scalding lead performance being overlooked in the recent Oscar nominations. What do people want from their films? Apparently not Britain’s sharpest and funniest observer of contemporary life firing on all cylinders and writing a role for Jean-Baptiste – fiery depressive Pansy Deacon – that goes toe to toe with her Oscar-winning turn in Secrets & Lies (1996) all those years ago. Pansy is the tempest at the centre of a portrait of a contemporary Black British family in which each character feels fully drawn and a sense of life happening comes at us with real nuance and force.

Where’s it on? ICA

The first thing that anyone notes about South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo is how prolific he is. He’s been averaging two features a year of late. But that doesn’t mean his films are particularly easy to see. Their theatrical distribution in the UK is patchy, only a few have come out on disc, and at the present moment not one of his features is currently streaming in the UK. So this ICA release for By the Stream – one of the two features with his signature from 2024 – is an essential trip for anyone in the vicinity. It features Hong regulars Kim Min-hee and Kwon Hae-hyo in a collegiate tale involving a young professor, her actor uncle and the amateur theatre project she’s trying to salvage from scandal. 

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Richard Linklater’s beloved peripatetic romance premiered 30 years ago this month at the Sundance Film Festival. Linklater was hot off Dazed and Confused (1993) when he had this simplest of ideas: to have Ethan Hawke’s American tourist Jesse meet Julie Delpy’s visiting Frenchwoman, Céline, on a train to Vienna, then to allow them a whole movie to walk and talk through the city, getting to know each other and slowly falling in love. The results were an American indie closer to the mood of the naturalistic dramas of Éric Rohmer but also like a Gen X equivalent to post-war city-based romances like The Clock (1945) and Roman Holiday (1953). It led to two sequels, becoming the ‘Before trilogy’, which followed Jesse and Céline into marriage and middle age. The original makes a welcome return to cinemas this week for its anniversary.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

As the world waits to see what Spike Lee and Denzel Washington make of their upcoming remake Highest 2 Lowest, here is a not-before-time Blu-ray release for Akira Kurosawa’s original kidnap thriller. Ranking among his greatest achievements, this gripping contemporary pulse-racer is itself derived from an English-language source, Ed McBain’s 1959 novel King’s Ransom. Toshiro Mifune plays the high-powered businessman, on the cusp of a corporate buyout, who receives a call demanding a ransom for the return of his chauffeur’s son. Tracking the ensuing drama with procedural detail and a scope that draws an entire society into the viewfinder, High and Low is a touchpoint for the likes of Memories of Murder (2003) and Zodiac (2007). It’s released this week alongside another classic contemporary Kurosawa: 1949’s Stray Dog.

Where’s it on? BBC2, Saturday, 15:40

Ang Lee had made three warm, sharp Taiwanese comedy dramas, including 1993’s The Wedding Banquet, when he unexpectedly got the gig making this 1995 big-screen version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, now 30 years old. Adapted for the screen by Emma Thompson, who also stars as the eldest of the three Dashwood sisters, it proved the perfect fit for Lee’s sensitive talent: his expert eye for manners and emotion. By the time it was released in the UK in February 1996, the nation was in the grip of Austen fever thanks to the previous autumn’s broadcast of the BBC’s blockbuster version of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. Sense and Sensibility offered cinemagoers a similarly beguiling dose of period wit and wiles, with Thompson joined by Kate Winslet (as young Marianne Dashwood), Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant.